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How, then, do the symbols and narratives of the nation become objects of emotional investment? In practice, this happens through two interrelated processes: continuous mass-media priming and chains of ritual interactions. In Foucauldian terms, the first process might be considered ‘discursive’ and the second ‘social’, and both of these dimensions were in evidence during China’s networked spectacles.

Ideologies like nationalism require a certain willingness to accept the broad parameters of the ideational framework as common sense, and it is in this context that the programming activities of actors with privileged access to mass communication networks are important. Switched into the networks at powerful, authoritative nodes like mass media corporations or state information agencies, media workers translate their understanding of ideological imperatives into an assemblage of recognisable signs, layering these components in different modes and

imbuing them with cues for emotional reaction. As such processes unfold over extended periods of time, flanked by media usage in classrooms and homes, public spaces and work places, the array of emotionally charged symbols enters into the background of everyday interactions, but it nevertheless leaves those who have continuously interacted with those symbols ‘primed’ to understand their emotional force in moments when these symbols become the focus of heightened attention (see also Althaus & Coe 2011, Iyengar et al. 1982, Krosnick & Kinder 1990, and the contributions in Molden 2014).

Recall the flag-raising ceremony during the Olympics opening ceremony. One of the most striking aspects of this sequence was its emotional force. Even an unsentimental viewer would be hard pressed to dismiss the pathos of the proceedings. This pathos is manufactured (see Carroll 1998) to tap the ‘structures of feeling’ (Callahan 2010: 19) that underlie national identity construction. In this particular case, the emotional effect of the sound and images has been carefully engineered to evoke nationalist sentiments. Throughout this four-minute performance, TV audiences have been shown Chinese flags for roughly two minutes, and they have been exposed to the colour red for over three. The symbolic colour is as much a sign of the nation as are the melodramatic music, the lyrics, the CCTV announcement, the children in ethnic attire, the flag, the soldiers, the Chinese leaders on the dais, the flag-waving and cheering Chinese audience, and the little girl in the red dress I discussed earlier. The TV editors’ montage ensures that all of these elements come together ‘naturally’, in what Alexander has referred to as a coherent fusion (2006: 29). This barrage of symbols ensures that the significance of the moment does not go unnoticed, while the redundancy in meanings ensures that the message is relayed unambiguously (see Barthes 1977): the Chinese nation is proudly hosting this international event.

Stacking various signifiers helps to ‘programme’ the meaning of the ritual, but it does not fully account for the emotional impact itself. That impact relies on audiences of different orders of the spectatorship process recognising specific symbols and the emotional weight assigned to them during the ritual. The proceedings are designed to address the expectations of Chinese viewers, or at least what the organisers believed those expectations to be. These viewers, in turn, had been primed for years to regard this moment as a significant national occasion. As discussed in chapter 2, commentaries and news reports in the national media had continuously built up to this event, and China’s leaders had repeatedly

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framed this moment as a national achievement. This is precisely what Dayan & Katz (1992: 17) have in mind when they describe such events as powerful interruptions to daily life, that is as formal rituals that deserve special attention (hence the name opening ceremony).

While the presentation of national symbols during an interruption of profane normality lends them an air of the sacred, the symbols themselves work precisely because of their profane normality. The audience has not only been primed for several years to expect this event, it has also been primed for decades to recognise the national symbols through which the event makes itself intelligible. This is the kind of normalisation of national symbols that Billig (2009: 38) discusses when he writes of ‘flagging’ activities, and that I have discussed in chapter 2. Saturating public life with symbols of the nation moves them to the background of everyday life while also keeping them ever present: flags hang from government buildings, students sing national hymns in school, TV news anchors announce national policies, the national emblem graces every social security card in the country, and each banknote features the face of the nation’s founder. Through this overexposure, citizens forget that they are continuously reminded of their nationhood. The reminders ‘hardly register in the flow of daily attention, as citizens rush past on their daily business’ (ibid.: 38). The effect is that these ‘forgotten reminders’ can be activated or ‘flagged’ as needed, providing instantaneous access to a pool of emotions that national ideology has associated with them over the years.

While this construction of ‘banal nationalism’ is as much apparent in Chinese daily life as in China’s patriotic education campaigns (Zhao 2004: 218-227), it is by no means a particularly Chinese phenomenon. All of the above mechanisms are used widely in other nation-states, whether in the Americas, Europe, East Asia, or elsewhere in the world, and they are visible throughout the history of the modern mass event. It is in fact the very normality that national symbols possess in a world of nation- states, as well as the universal emotions they appeal to (feelings of home, belonging, safety, etc.), that allow the organisers of networked spectacles to effectively ‘fuse’ various performative elements into a compelling nationalist narrative. It is the reason foreign observers may feel similarly moved by a cute Chinese girl singing an ode to her motherland to the domestic audience. The symbolic language of the spectacle is familiar. It is understood inter-nationally because the world of nation-states has created ‘assumptions about what a nation is: as such it is a theory of

communication, as well as a theory about the world being “naturally” divided into such communities’ (Billig 2009: 63).

The flag-raising moment of the Olympics indeed promised that all humankind would come together as ‘One World’ with ‘One Dream’ – only this dream was not about sports or a collective humanism. It was about the audience’s collective sense of modern nation-ness. This, then, is one of the opening ceremony’s main accomplishments: that it is able to cleverly draw from nationalist primes and invite such understanding while addressing both Chinese and foreign audiences.

The cultural artefacts that represent nation-ness become emotionally charged through the mechanisms of ritual interaction. As I discussed in chapter 1, people assemble ‘culture’ or ‘society’ through their open- ended social and communicative interactions with each other and the objects of their social worlds. These interactions form ‘rituals’ when they prompt actors to focus their attention and their emotions, and in such moments the actors produce ‘a momentarily shared reality, which thereby generates solidarity and symbols of group membership’ (Collins 2003: 612). An important component of such a ritual is what Collins refers to as ‘entrainment’, using a metaphor from biology that normally describes how, for instance, cicadas match their bodily rhythms to environmental cues. In human ritual interactions, the participants also match each other’s bodily cues and activities, mirroring each other’s behaviours and responding to social rhythms, and the more complete this process of synchronisation is, so Collins argues, the more emotionally satisfying and powerful it becomes. Examples include groups of people shouting, cheering, or moving in unison, for instance during sports events.

Networked spectacles are noteworthy sites of ritual entrainment; they are designed to elicit collective responses such as cheering and applause, often prompting participants to launch into such expressions ‘spontaneously’, but actually cueing these emotional moments through carefully designed event dynamics. The Olympics opening ceremony contained numerous such moments during which audiences were prompted to react with expressions of collective awe, for instance during the fireworks, the synchronous performances of large numbers of actors, or the rare moments of planned interruption, such as when the men manipulating the complex movable typeface during the scene ‘Script’ emerged from their hiding places to provide a rare peek behind the scenes of this complex performative arrangement. Similarly, the China Pavilion’s feature films during the Shanghai Expo used filmic

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elements like camera angles, musical scores, and editing dynamics to build entrainment and lead viewers to important moments of national identification within the films, for instance the moment when TheRoad to our Beautiful Life pauses its depiction of break-neck development and urbanisation to immerse viewers in a slow-motion assemblage of visual disaster tropes that construct a singular moment of national unity, in this case the Sichuan earthquake. When I attended a screening of this feature film in July 2010, the audience was indeed transfixed by the visual and acoustic spectacle, and the emotional tensions in the theatre were palpable, with several audience members around me bursting into tears at the depiction of national solidarity.

Not all ritual interactions need to be this monumental. Entrainment also occurs in everyday situations (see Goffman 1967), such as the kind of non-interactions that take place between the patrons of a café (see Woldoff et al. 2013) as they seemingly ignore each other and go about their business, reading the paper, drinking their coffee, or working on their laptops. Nevertheless, those present in the café still contribute to the general atmosphere through their minute social signals, creating emotional attachments and interpersonal meanings. Of course, places like cafés are also designed to yield certain effects (Waxman 2006), and they play important roles in social and economic orders (Davidson & Rafailidis 2011), even if patrons and staff are not necessarily aware of these dimensions of their casual interactions. Similarly, some of the most interesting interactions during China’s networked spectacles were small- scale, for instance the everyday encounters between volunteer workers and event visitors which the state was relying on to present a positive image to foreigners and encourage self-discipline among its citizens (Chong 2011). In fact, I would argue that the lengthy interactions involved in recruiting, training, and testing volunteers during these events already served as an important opportunity for everyday entrainment and, ultimately, initiation into communal sentiments (see Zhuang & Girginov 2012 on volunteer selection during the Beijing Olympics). Such activities are no less important for the construction of emotions and nationalist discourse than the planned tear-jerker moments in mass communication products like feature films, core exhibits, or official telecasts. Much like I have described attempts to manage the cultural parameters in which politics unfold as cultural governance, we may think of such efforts to regulate the emotional textures of communal understanding as emotional governance.

The daily activities at the Shanghai Expo territory are a case in point: the organisers staged daily mock national days for different participating countries, and they hosted parades and musical performances throughout the day. These activities served as reminders that the main actors at the event were nation-states, but they also invited visitors to participate as official actors symbolically staged the event’s ‘internationalness’. A particularly playful example was the ‘expo passport’ (Figure 5.5). Visitors could purchase this facsimile of an actual passport and then pretend to ‘travel’ to different countries by visiting national pavilions and gathering ‘visa’ stamps. In such instances, the movement across the territory, the activity of standing in line, or the sudden ‘stampedes’ caused by stamp- hungry passport holders as they struggled to be first in line at some pavilion, all revolved round the tangible object of the passport, allowing visitors to project their experiences and emotions onto this symbol of nationness. Incidentally, this symbol would later sell at exorbitant prices on e-commerce sites, as visitors with ‘complete’ stamp collections sold their expo passports at prices equivalent to those of a new iPhone (CNN 2010). Such sales of event paraphernalia provide a reminder of how nationalism is also intricately linked to capitalist consumption patterns.

Figure 5.5: The Expo Passport. Playing World Citizen at the Shanghai Expo 2010. Image © F. Schneider 2019.

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In that sense, investment in the idea of being a member of a nation was not merely communicated to visitors through the expo exhibits or the accompanying mass media messages, it was actively practised by the visitors themselves, who were invited to enact the activities of citizens travelling through this imaginary, miniature world. It is precisely such ritual interactions that make the kinds of ‘watch signs’ I have discussed above more than just cognitive devices that connect to existing maps of background knowledge. They become elements in chains of ritual interaction as actors deploy or handle them within their meaning-making efforts. As Collins (2004) puts it, the actors ‘charge’ these artefacts with emotional energy, imbuing ideological concepts with personal feelings through interaction, and this ultimately creates the ‘pathos formulae’ that Müller & Kappas (2011) have explored.

For tropes such as those that constitute national narratives, this entails the long-term usage I have discussed earlier. The practice of ‘playing’ citizen with an expo passport gains meaning because of the continuous exposure to the idea that humans should be nationals, encapsulated powerfully in the objects of actual passports and visa stamps. Priming and ritual interactions work together. The PRC anniversary parade illustrates this, showing how a ritual ‘on the ground’ is communicated through mass communication technology to relay a series of recognisable primes for the imagined community while at the same time encouraging ritual entrainment, albeit at a distance. When Hu Jintao travelled past the troops to engage in staged dialogue, the exchange provided an opportunity for the broadcaster CCTV to stage the segment as a rhythmic pattern of 35-second narrative units, each cycling through the same camera angles and shot lengths. The march of the troops across Tiananmen Square was similarly designed as a cycle of recurring visual patterns. Such repetition invites ‘parasocial’ engagement (Giles 2002), that is a sense of interaction with people and situations that are only known indirectly, at a distance, through mass communication technologies (for examples and discussions see Boyle & Magnusson 2007, Frederick et al. 2012, Madison & Porter 2015, 2016, and Schiappa et al. 2007). TV viewers do not personally know Hu Jintao, and they are unlikely to know the soldiers or the spectators depicted on screen. Yet, through the sense of collective ritual, carefully designed by the event organisers and the media workers at the national broadcaster CCTV, they are invited to imagine themselves as affiliates of these fellow citizens, and consequently as part of the nation, which is itself a parasocial entity.

5.6 Conclusion

In this chapter, I have discussed how elite actors, especially the authorities, design and circulate recognisable symbols of the nation, how they narrate the nation’s history, and how they tweak the meanings that surround the nation and its state. Throughout China’s networked spectacles, this entailed a marked shift in Chinese historiography, and a reinterpretation of what the Chinese nation should stand for. Through substantial ideological work, official actors imagined the nation as a benevolent family member, presenting ‘China’ to audiences at home and abroad as ‘lovable’ (ke’ai可爱_{). They also systematically broke with the}

PRC’s revolutionary past and contextualised the nation within the past 30 years of reform efforts, and especially within the ideological parameters that the Hu-Wen administration had been laying out at the start of the 21st century.

These discursive activities also had an important social dimension, as actors invited audiences to participate actively in the circulation and consumption of national symbols that had long served as ‘primes’ for communal feelings. The organisers created opportunities for ritual interactions, encouraging participants to associate cultural artefacts and symbolic representations with their own sense of nation-ness, through continuous use. Such emotional governance activities made the artefacts of the nation available as depositories and carriers of the kinds of feelings that drive association with imagined communities like nations: social affirmation, security, certainty, and competence (see also my discussion in Schneider 2018: ch.2). These emotional ‘charges’ (Collins 2003) then become available to actors to be utilised in the name of national unity, and to pave the way for specific policy initiatives, such as the Hu-Wen administration’s attempt to design a ‘harmonious society’.

6 The Making of a